Greg Glienna is the writer, director, and star of the original “Meet the Parents.”
The 2000 hit comedy “Meet the Parents”, starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, was actually a re-make of Glienna’s dark independent comedy filmed in 1992.
Terry Bell: I was curious – do a lot of major motion pictures get their start this way? Do big studios look around the independent film world for inspiration and ideas?
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Greg Glienna: I don’t know if it’s ever happened. I’m sure it has, but I don’t know of any examples of something [else] like this.
TB: But it worked out great for you.
GG: Yes and no. My friend Emo Philips said it was like he knew how the Indians felt selling Manhattan for beads.
TB: Your work is inspired a lot by old silent films – old silent comedies.
GG: I think the best comedy is the comedy that’s visual. You can get a laugh without saying anything. It’s the best humor to me. So I was trying to make a film that was very situational and very visual, but yet had dialogue.
TB: It sounds like it was a rough shoot. That must have – maybe in a strange way – worked to your advantage.
GG: I think so. I mean, we shot it for $30,000. The house [belonged to] a friend of my mom’s. I think it does give the film a nightmare quality, the low-budgetness of it.
TB: It seems like they took a lot of the dark elements out of it in the Ben Stiller picture.
GG: Oh, yeah. What I learned with scripts is that’s the first thing to go in Hollywood.
TB: Really, the dark stuff?
GG: They just don’t like that. They take it out.
TB: Anything that would make an audience uneasy.
GG: Yeah.
TB: The story about how your independent film became a big studio picture is that Steven Soderbergh, the director, saw your film, liked it – and what happened after that?
GG: He called me and said this should be a big studio film – this is very commercial. And they flew my co-writer, Mary Ruth Clark and myself, to New York to work with him for three days, and we worked on the script – his vision of it. Five years went by, it got a different director, and that’s Hollywood. We’d get reports that Jim Carrey was going to star in it, and Steven Spielberg was attached to it. It was a joke with my friends – “Oh, what’s going on with that ‘Meet the Parents’ thing? Who’s involved in it now?”
TB: That could be a movie!
See more of Greg Glienna and the original “Meet the Parents” on Director’s Cut, Friday June 7 at 10 p.m. on Wisconsin Public Television.
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